Working Drafts available in EPUB3
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
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Ivan Herman
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- Published:
As reported elsewhere, the Digital Publishing Interest Group has published its first two public Working Drafts. Beyond the content of those documents, the publication has another aspect worth mentioning. For the first time, “alternate” versions of the two documents have been published, alongside the canonical HTML versions, in EPUB3 format. Because EPUB3 is based on the Open Web Platform, it is a much more faithful alternative to the original content than, for example, a PDF version (which has also been used, time to time, as alternate versions of W3C documents). The EPUB3 versions (of the “Requirements for Latin Text Layout and Pagination“ and the “Annotation Use Cases” Drafts, both linked from the respective documents’ front matter) can be used, for example, for off-line reading, relying on different EPUB readers, available either as standalone applications or as browser extensions.
(The EPUB3 versions were produced using a Python program, also available on github.)
Thank you for this news.
But is there any particular reason for not integrating comprehensive TOC ? it's not possible ? With only the first level : difficult to navigate through these documents ... best SD
Each TR document (i.e., each "chapter" in the generated books) has a more comprehensive TOC; extracting/copying the full TOC may have lead to huge TOC-s when several TR documents are bundled together. But yes, if, on long term, this becomes an issue then this may be a decision to revisit. (To be frank: the issue is also that the TOC-s in the various TR documents have different structures, meaning that, at least in some cases, comprehensively extracting them is a challenge. If all documents were done in respec it would probably be easier, but that is not the case…)
Will this format (epub) indexed by search engines? For example, I'll do a book in epub format, using a new method of partitioning and publish it on your website. Will the content of the book indexed google?
To be honest: I do not know! My gut feeling is that the answer is no, ie, that the search engines do not unzip the EPUB file to get into the details for indexing but... I may be wrong. Actually… I wish I was wrong!